[MUD-Dev] Roleplaying in Muds

[Miroslav Silovic]

"Josh Anderson" <joshua18 at home.com> writes:

> Miroslav Silovic wrote:
> > OOC communication is used to
> > simplify things that would otherwise require a long time just to go
> > from room to room and talk to people - and do things that are actually
> > fun.
> 
> "A valid roleplaying reason for them must exist."
> 
> You can quote me on that one.  Heck, this is a mailing list, you can quote
> me on anything, I suppose...but I digress.
> 
> What I mean by this, is that I think it's rather silly to have some
> apparently godgiven talent to be able to speak across the globe, spheres of
> existence, planes, or incredible distances to whoever you want, or everyone
> at once, any time at all.  I can't think of a single reason why any normal
> human (dwarf/elf/blah) should be able to mysteriously have this ability with
> little to no penalty for it's use.

I disagree with this. That's the whole point of the OOC channels: they
are OOC. When you talk on then, you don't roleplay. Knowledge obtained
on the OOC channels is OOC (i.e. using it ICly constitutes cheating).

Channels that exist with valid roleplaying reason are IC (for example,
radio devices on SF and modern-time MUDs). They are out of scope of
what I said (and then, they tend to look stupid in a fantasy game - I
mean, in a world where 'tell' is IC, and exist with a 'valid
roleplaying reason', everybody supposedly has telepathy?! Yeah, right
:P )

Not that enforcing IC/OOC separation is easy. On MUSHes, it's enforced
by the culture and by the peer pressure, but an occasional @nuking
certainly drives the point across. However, if you're not going to
trust your playerbase to -roleplay-, then I say just don't bother and
build a pure hack'n'slash MUD (because otherwise you get a poor
hack'n'slash -and- a poor roleplaying MUD, pun intended).

I'll write a longer post on this topic, with a more appropriate
subject.

> These would be fairly common items, but would perhaps be a little
> expensive to buy.  That accomplishes two things...loose cash in the
> mud goes down, and newbies generally would have a harder time
> spamming channels with nonsense.  Anyways, you get my point.  All
> I'm asking for is that there be something to validate having
> something as powerful as across-world communication.  It doesn't
> have to be an object.  It doesn't have to be a talent only usable Z
> number of times a day.  Just something.

Just to make sure I'm completely understood: OOC channels are not a
cross-world communication. They're player-to-player communication and
are completely irrelevant to the game world (as somebody else pointed
out, you could just as easily use ICQ). Their power, in game terms, is
zero - people who want to use the information obtained via an OOC
channel need to do something -else- to justify it, or at least
establish that their characters are capable of doing it.

--
How to eff the ineffable?



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